Essays

From time immemorial man's search for peace has been offset by his desire and instinct for conquest and defense. For just as long, probably, the concept of disarmament, meaning the destruction and elimination of weapons or their conversion to peaceful uses, has recurred in men's minds as a hopeful means of attaining peace. Today we are approaching-if we have not already reached-the era of ultimate weapons. That is to say, we live now in a period in which weapons have become so destructive in their power that they can or could encompass the end of mankind itself. If it is said that even more destructive weapons lie ahead, and that we have yet to reach the ultimate, one can safely repeat that we are at a stage of weapons development where destruction is possible on so "grand" a scale that the direct and indirect consequences of their use would be incalculable and totally beyond all standards of previous comparison.

FOR world Communism 1961 was the year of the great schism. "Polycentrism," a term apparently first used by Palmiero Togliatti in June 1956, is not yet in the dictionaries, but it has become a most important fact in world politics.

In foreign affairs today, both policy and performance require more subtlety and sophistication than heretofore. The need arises from no significant change in human relations, for the basic factors in man's relationship to himself and to other men have not altered radically. When we speak of "a new world," "a new age" or employ one of the other current expressions, it brings more confusion than clarity to thought. During my own lifetime I have known the steel age, the air age, the age of science, the age of technology, the atomic age, the space age, or, on different levels, the age of democracy, the age of totalitarianism, the age of capitalism, the age of Communism, the age of peace and the age of war. When ages shoot by at so rapid a clip the concept is worthless, and confusing.

A Sharp distinction is often drawn between arms control and disarmament. The former seeks to reshape military incentives and capabilities; the latter, it is alleged, eliminates them. But the success of either depends on mutual deterrence. Short of universal brain surgery, nothing can erase the memory of weapons and how to build them. If "total disarmament" is to make war unlikely, it must reduce the incentives. It cannot eliminate the potential for destruction; the most primitive war can be modernized by rearmament as it goes along.

When France and Germany, with Italy and the three Benelux countries, made it clear that they were really going to form a customs union, they forced the British government to face a decision it had hoped to avoid. Now Britain's decision to join the Common Market, if reasonable terms can be agreed on, requires the United States to make some major decisions of its own. Our action-or the lack of it-will pose new choices for the rest of the world.

It is already clear that the most serious obstacles to Britain's entry into the Common Market lie not so much in any direct clash of economic interest between Britain and Western Europe as in the difficulty of transforming and modifying the vast web of Britain's external trading commitments. A loose, worldwide, pragmatic association has to be shrunk, without too much damage, into a close, contractual relationship. For extra-European communities, the squeezing and pinching threaten economic disturbance and political resentment and nowhere perhaps do the problems seem more daunting than in independent Africa where, by a chance of history, the confrontation of Commonwealth and Common Market is physically most direct and potentially most disruptive.

Geography gives Canada a strategic position unlike that of any other ally of the United States. Situated between two nuclear titans, the Soviet Union and the United States, it is certain to be automatically and totally involved in any general nuclear war. Furthermore, the vast Canadian land mass, stretching far into the north, has become a prime strategic asset in the protection of the only force capable of deterring a Soviet onslaught upon the West: it affords the strategic air forces of the United States the essential early warning which is vital to the protection of the whole Atlantic world.

Anyone wishing to master the art of confusing the issues, scoring effective but unfair debating points, and persuading others to miss the point, should make a study of what is widely accepted in the West today as enlightened, liberal discussion of international politics. Many politicians, some of whom perhaps agree with Wilde's proposition that to be understood is to be found out, make no sustained or imaginative effort at clarifying issues and explaining policies; and many intellectuals seem to consider marching, sitting, signing, visiting, going to jail and attending conferences (all activities which involve contributing prestige rather than intellectual talent) as more important political activities than attempting to raise the standard of public discussion. Debating devices which are manifestly unfair and which can do nothing but mislead are accepted as normal weapons of controversy, even by, and in fact especially by, those who make the highest moral claims for their case. Such techniques are not for the most part new, but it is interesting and perhaps important to see how they are applied to the facts of contemporary international politics.

When some foreign observers of Latin American affairs see the recent Brazilian crisis as a conflict between "feudals" and "reactionaries" on one side and "liberals" and "far-seeing leaders" on the other, a Brazilian may be inclined to think that they fail to understand that Brazil is a nation somewhat apart from neighboring Spanish American Republics. They insist on thinking of the Brazilian armed forces as if they were of the conventional Spanish American type and of Brazilian military leaders as if they were potential military dictators, eager for the first opportunity to enjoy the delights of absolute power. They write of a country which is going through a rapid-indeed, too rapid-process of industrialization and urbanization as if it were still dominated by feudal agrarian barons. Hence their use and abuse of expressions like "feudal," "reactionary," "caudillismo" in regard to modern Brazil.

As John Foster Dulles wrote in 1957, "There can never in the long run be real peace unless there is justice and law. Peace is a coin which has two sides: one is the renunciation of force, the other side is the according of justice."1 World attention has too long been directed to one face of the coin at the expense of the other.

The conflict between little Albania and the Soviet Union is today at the center of the Soviet-Chinese rift. This first became apparent at the Bucharest Congress of June 1960, when of all the heads of Communist Parties of Eastern Europe only Enver Hoxha was absent. However, the clash between the two countries had been proceeding undercover for a long time. To understand its roots, let us first turn to Albanian-Jugoslav relations.

Flanking the sea artery connecting the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and virtually linking the Asian mainland with the Indonesian archipelago, the island of Singapore occupies a strategic position in southeastern Asia. Toward its 220 square miles of territory have converged races from all the Orient, but especially the southern Chinese in their ubiquitous quest for commercial opportunities. When Sir Stamford Raffles established a trading post near the Singapore River on February 6, 1819, the island's only inhabitants were a few hundred Malays. Four months later, however, he wrote: "From the number of Chinese already settled, and the peculiar attraction of the place for that industrious race, it may be presumed that they will always form the largest part of the community." Today, some 75 percent of Singapore's million and three-quarters inhabitants are Chinese- the largest urban concentration anywhere of overseas Chinese.

At a time when the NATO nations are having serious trouble in pulling their forces together to meet the Soviet threat in Berlin, the possibility that three new, well-equipped, well-manned divisions might act in concert with them in case of an attack on Western Europe opens up an attractive prospect. Three such divisions are already in process of being formed; they are not being formed by one of the 15 nations in the NATO alliance, but by little, neutral Switzerland on its own initiative and at its own expense.

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